Eerie But Slightly Disappointing Zombie / Killer Virus British Horror Flick

Rating: 5/10 (26 March 2006)

Jim is the victim of an auto crash who wakes up after twenty-eight days in a deserted London hospital. Unable to find anybody, he wanders the streets, is attacked by some frenzied people and rescued by a woman called Selena. She explains that a virus has wiped out British civilisation. Hearing a radio broadcast, they head north to see if they can find any other survivors, and any hope of a future.
This is a film of two halves; the first is a frightening, authentic-looking and spine-tingling odyssey, as our hero wakes up to an apocalypse and stumbles numbly through the ruined streets of Westminster, trying to grasp the enormity of the situation and find a focus. The second half, set in a stately home taken over by a makeshift platoon of dumbbell army squaddies, unfortunately turns into a formulaic series of standard horror scenes. There's a lot to recommend this though - despite a low budget, the deserted London scenes are eerie and impressive, as Murphy crosses Westminster Bridge and walks up Whitehall to The Mall with nobody around. The performances are good, the atmosphere is grim (except for the surprisingly bland and upbeat ending), the horror is treated seriously and the "infected" people are shot with weird spastic camera movements that turn them into human versions of the old Tasmanian Devil cartoons. There were a few too many gaps for me in Alex Garland's script though - I'd have liked to know more about the virus (are the victims dead, do they eat and if so what, are they capable of rational thought), the action is flashy but insubstantial, and Jim's transformation in the last two reels into a manic acrobatic assassin is just plain stupid. This is Day Of The Triffids meets Day Of The Dead, and is reminiscent of many other more enjoyable films (Night Of The Comet, Lifeforce, The Quiet Earth, etc), but is still a decent horror movie with some grown-up scares.